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161. An assessment of crime related risks in the Sahel

Author:
Laurence Ammour
Publication Date:
11-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
NATO Defense College
Abstract:
The Sahel, a vast belt of land covering nine million square kilometers and encompassing ten countries, has always been a transit area for constant flows of people, trade, finance and religious groups. For the past twenty years, organized crime has had ample opportunity to develop here, either by using traditional networks or by taking over areas where there is no state control. It is also a region afflicted by perennial crises and weakened states, notwithstanding its undeniable strategic importance arising from its natural resources: oil, gold, phosphates, diamonds, copper, iron, coal, nickel, zinc, bauxite, uranium, plutonium, manganese, cobalt, silver, chrome and precious timbers.
Topic:
Crime, Economics, Natural Resources, and Fragile/Failed State
Political Geography:
Africa

162. Corps et politique: Individu et société

Author:
Arlette Farge
Publication Date:
03-2006
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
In this essay, two themes––the body and the political and the individual and society––are used to reflect upon the historian's task. By focusing upon the body as represented in the police archives of the eighteenth century, for example, we learn about the lived experience of domination, and the body-as-royal subject provides us with insight into the mechanisms and preoccupations of political power. The often incoherent and chaotic efforts of thinking bodies to engage with or resist that power are at the very matrix of social relations, and it is up to the historian to reconstruct these efforts in their very incoherence in order to remain as true as possible to the reality in which our historical subjects dwelled. An emphasis on articulating the experience of the individual reinforces this ability to reconstitute the ways in which subjects defined themselves via ruptures, interrupted trajectories, and reconstructed paths, which, in turn, underscores the fact that disorder is the ordinary course of social communities. Individual choices themselves reveal the lack of coherence of the social, and it is by relating and taking account of this incoherence that a historian may provide a non-teleological interpretation of the past that emanates from the interior of a society's fragile and hesitating common fate, that allows him or her to understand and recapture for contemporary readers a world that sought only to exist.
Topic:
Fragile/Failed State

163. Consolidating the Palestinian-Israeli Ceasefire

Author:
Michael Herzog
Publication Date:
02-2005
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
The February 8 Sharm al-Shaykh summit may have marked the definitive end of the Arafat era. Both Israeli and Palestinian leaders issued orchestrated parallel statements declaring cessation of hostilities and highlighted the resumption of bilateral engagement after almost four and a half years of armed confrontation. Within hours, however, militant Palestinian groups challenged these commitments through attacks on Israeli targets. To take full advantage of the opportunities now available will require active effort to consolidate the fledgling ceasefire. This includes imposing the full force of the Palestinian central authority against rejectionists, clarifying the ambiguities in the parallel commitments, and enlisting key states and international actors in the campaign to combat Iranian and Hizballah designs to undermine this fragile process.
Topic:
Security, Religion, and Fragile/Failed State
Political Geography:
Israel, Palestine, and Arab Countries